Third:.

THE DYING HOUR.

"How many miles to Babylon?

Threescore and ten.

Can I get there by candlelight?

Yes, and back again."

-Traditional.

CHAPTER 23.

Orientation.

NETFEED/SPORTS: "Body Fascism" Litigant Killed in Practice (visual: Note outside courtroom after victory) VO: Edward Note, who won a court case in which he proved a local professional football team was discriminating against him based on body type when they initially refused to give him a tryout, was killed in his second day of practice with the team. Members of the Pensacola Fishery Barons BMFFL team, who are responsible to UN antidiscrimination laws because their stadium was built with revenue from local taxes, put on a public face of regret, but some team members said off the record that Note "only got what he deserved."

TEAM MEMBER (anonymated): "What did the guy weigh, a hundred twenty pounds, old school measurements? Running around with guys that weigh three or four times that? It's no wonder he got his foolish tiny ass crushed. Too bad for his kids, though."

VO: The thirty-eight-year-old Note, who declared contemporary pro sports a bastion of "body fascism," was apparently caught underneath a pile-up in practice and asphyxiated. His family is demanding an investigation of his death.

"Just a minute, Olga." The woman, a stranger of course, but acting as familiar as an old friend, handed her a cup of coffee which steamed convincingly. "I hear you're working for that J Corporation now. That must be fascinating-you hear so much about them in the news. What's it like?"

"I'm not allowed to talk about where I work," she said.

The woman smiled. "Oh, of course not-I know that! But I'm not trying to get you to tell any important secrets, am I? Just . . . what's it like? Is it really on an island?"

Surely everyone knew that. Still, Olga was unbending, "I'm sorry-I'm just not allowed to talk about where I work."

The woman frowned. "You're being really grumpy and silly about this. You must not be getting enough sleep. Are you working nights or something?"

"I'm really sorry, but I am not allowed to talk about my work."

The woman waved her hand in disgust. A moment later the room wavered and changed, so quickly that Olga felt a bit dizzy, almost sick.

They should do a better job with their transitions, she thought. If they ever got a job on the real net, for Obolos or someone, they'd get ripped to shreds for something like that.

She sat patiently as someone who was apparently a relative of hers asked her to bring home some extra office supplies for the kids-nothing important, just a few sticktights or hardclips for the poor, underprivileged darlings to make art projects for school. Olga sighed and began her refusals, waiting as patiently as she could through the upward spiral of recrimination, waiting for it all to end.

"Well, an excellent score," Mr. Landreaux said after she had stepped out of the hologram room. He was a small man with a shaved head and a scatter of sparkling stones embedded in his wrist-trying a little too hard to look young, Olga thought. "You really studied up, didn't you?"

She tried not to smile. A quarter of an hour's examination of the company's voluminous hiring package the night before had made it pretty clear what the general idea was. "Yes, sir," she said. "This job is very important for me." And you can't even guess how true that is, can you?

"I'm glad to hear that. It's important to me, too." The personnel officer squinted at his wallscreen. "Your references are very, very good. Fourteen years at Reichert Systems-that's a very good company." He smiled, but she saw something else glint in his mild gray eyes. "Tell me again why you left Toronto."

This is really just a junior version of the man who gave me my exit interview at Obolos, she thought, another pink soft animal with sharp teeth. Does that Jongleur fellow grow them in vats, like those space-tomatoes? Aloud, she recited the story Catur Ramsey had invented for her, and that his friends had somehow turned into accomplished informational fact. "It's my daughter Carole, sir. Since her . . .

since she split up with her husband, she needs some help with the kids so she can keep her job. She works so hard." Olga shook her head. This was cake. Convincing a hundred overstimulated children to be quiet so they wouldn't scare the Boxy Ox, that was real acting. If the whole thing were not so strange and terrible, she suspected she might even be enjoying this little trick-corporate folk were such easy yet somehow satisfying targets. "So I just thought, do you know, if I were nearer. . . ."

"So you left the Great White North and came all the way down here to the Big Easy," Landreaux said cheerfully. "Well, laissez les bontemps roulez, as we say." He leaned over, mock-conspiratorial. "But not during working hours, of course."

She tried to look duly impressed by his informality. "Of course not, sir. I am a hard worker."

"I'm sure you are. Well, everything's in order, so I guess it's my pleasant job to welcome you to the J Corporation family." He extended his hand without standing, making her lean forward to shake it. "Your shift supervisor is Maria. You'll find her in Building Twelve down on the esplanade. Go see her now. Are you ready to start tonight?"

"Yes, sir. Thank you very much, sir."

He had already begun to lose interest, and was just turning back to his wallscreen when his attention snagged on the patch of white high on her neck. "You know, I was meaning to ask you," he said with deceptive lightness that did not lull her one little bit. "About that bandage on your neck. You don't have a health problem you haven't told us about, do you, Ms. Chotilo?"

Caught a little off-balance by hearing Aleksandr's last name after all these years, even though she herself had chosen it as an alias she could remember, it took her a moment to reorient. "Oh, this?" She touched the adhesive strip covering her t-jack. "I had a mole removed. That's all right, isn't it? It wasn't cancerous or anything, I . . . I just didn't like it."

He laughed and waved his hand. "Just trying to make sure nobody's signing up with us just to get our medical insurance." His face went through another little shift; the slightly ominous flicker came back. "See, we don't like to be tricked, Olga. J Corporation is a family, but a family has to protect itself. It can be an unpleasant world out there."

Out there, she guessed, meant anything more than five kilometers from the black tower. "Oh, I know, Mr. Landreaux," she assured him. "Full of bad people."

"Right you are," he said absently, his thoughts already back on the day ahead of him, the little tricks and traps and bumps of mid-level management.

Olga stood. His back was to her as she scuttled out.

As she walked across the plaza outside the corporation's orientation center, heading across the esplanade, she made a conscious effort not to look up at the black tower looming on the far side of the water. It was hard not to feel she was being watched, although it seemed like a lot of effort to expend on the newest employee of a staff of thousands. And why wouldn't a new employee look up at the tower, the corporate symbol?

Still, she just didn't want to, not until she was actually on the boat. She was beginning to feel superstitious about it, as if relaxing herself to that point would automatically draw a heavy hand to her shoulder, the corporate security people wanting to do more this time than ask a few harmless questions.

Building Twelve was a hangar built right out onto the pier. The massive hovercrafts that carried maintenance and custodial workers to and from the island lay at anchor, bumping against each other on the gentle swell. Inside the hangar was an entire complex-supply warehouses and changing rooms, currently filled with the echoing chatter of hundreds of voices, since one of the custodial shifts had just come back from the island.

Maria proved to be an immense and not particularly patient woman, her hair dyed a once-stylish polychrome silver, her black roots badly in need of a touch-up.

"Oh, Lord, another one," she said when Olga approached her. "Don't those pocket-jockeys over in Orientation know I got no time to teach anyone this week?" She gave Olga a look that suggested the new recruit would be doing the best thing for all concerned if she simply drowned herself in Lake Borgne immediately. "Esther? Where the hell are you? You take this new one, find her a uniform, tell her what to do. See if there's a badge for her on the fabricator thing. And if she gets in trouble, does something stupid, it's your ass, seen?"

Esther was a thin Hispanic woman close to Olga's own age, girlish in a tired way, with a kind, shy smile.

She helped Olga find a gray two-piece uniform in the right size from a rack that would have stretched from wingtip to wingtip on a Skywalker jet, then fed her past a series of bored functionaries until Olga had secured both her badge and a locker in one of the changing rooms. The place was like a boarding school for students with bad feet and aching joints, hundreds of black and brown women, as well as a few dozen European types like Olga, with English a second language for almost all.

As she changed, listening to the women shouting jokes across the humid locker room, Olga could almost believe for a moment that this was really her life, that the years on the net had never happened.

"Hurry up, now," Esther told her. "The boat leaves in five minutes."

Olga studied her own blank face on the badge, tilting it to see her hologrammed profile. I look like an old woman, she thought. God, I am an old woman. What do I think I'm doing with all this? She picked up her backpack, popped the locker closed, and realized she would probably never see those clothes again. Maybe I should have cut out the labels, like in that mystery I saw. Of course, if she had really planned to be a woman with no past, she should probably be infiltrating a corporation that didn't already have her face and real name tucked away somewhere in its vast complex of personnel files.

She tucked the pack under her arm and fell into the swirl of gray-clad women moving toward the dock.

In this strangest month of Olga's life, the meeting with Catur Ramsey had definitely been near the top of the list. It had been odd enough to pull off the road near Slidell into the picnic area and see him sitting on a bench-the same young man who, it seemed, had been at her own door for the first time only days ago, thousands of miles away in another country. He had hugged her, which was another unusual twist. Since when did lawyers hug people? Even a nice one like Ramsey?

Then, when the big blond man had stepped out of the parked van, she had experienced a moment of sinking fear and something worse. He had the look of a police officer, and for as long as it took him to cross the ten paces to the table she had been horribly certain that Ramsey had sold her out-for her own good, he would have deemed it, but no less a betrayal for that. But instead the man had only extended his hand, introducing himself as Major Michael Sorensen, then walked back to the car.

As if reading her mind, Ramsey had told her, "Hold on-it's going to get weirder." And when she saw the person Sorensen was lifting out of the van, Olga had to admit he had been right.

They had spent an hour talking while traffic rumbled past just on the other side of the trees, but Olga could remember little of it now. The shriveled man Sellars had spoken so quietly and carefully that at first Olga had taken offense a little, thinking she was being given the gentle treatment reserved for the pathetically unbalanced. After a while she came to realize it was just his way, and that this achingly thin man with runneled skin could not have taken a deep enough breath to speak loudly even if he had wanted to. And when she actually heard what he had to say, it kindled a spark of something like joyful relief inside her. She had not realized until then just how lonely she had become.

"I'm still not certain why you have experienced these things, Ms. Pirofsky," he had told her, "but whatever the cause, they are real. If I had all day, I could not tell you of all the strangeness I have encountered since I first began studying these matters. Whatever the source of your voices, it couldn't be a coincidence that you have been drawn to Jongleur's tower. We only wish to combine forces with you-to give you the best chance of getting answers safely, answers that we may need ourselves to put an end to a terrible, criminal conspiracy."

The conspiracy itself, at least in Sellars' hurried explanation, had quite boggled her. And other than the fact that he was some kind of military security specialist, she had never quite managed to understand the major's place in this tiny resistance movement-bizarrely, he had even mentioned a wife and children waiting at some motel. She was also still a little unsure how much Ramsey was involved, whether he had known any of these things when he had first interviewed her, but the mere fact that instead of receiving patronizing looks she was finally getting answers had made up for any residual confusion.

Sorensen, in a gruff but careful way that reminded her of her own long-dead father, had inspected the tiny store of possessions she planned to take to the island, and added one more item-a small silver ring with a single clear stone. The sparkling stone was not a gem at all, he had explained, but a lens with a tiny transponder hidden behind it. A camera ring.

"With this, we will see what you see, Ms. Pirofsky," Sellars told her.

Returned to companionable humanity after what she realized had been weeks of self-absorption and voluntary exile, a solitude made even more fierce when the voices of the children deserted her, Olga would have gladly stayed longer with Ramsey and the others, but Sellars had told her that time was running short. In his gentle way, he had pushed her to begin her incursion as quickly as possible, and since he had promised to find her a way in, using his unspecified talents to somehow get her onto the island legitimately, she had no desire to argue. And he had been as good as his word.

Once she was on the hovercraft, out in the hot, damp breeze of the foredeck with all the others, Olga could no longer avoid staring at the black tower. From the far shore it had looked something like a medieval cathedral, a jutting spire looming above more human-sized dwellings, but as it grew into the sunset-streaked sky before her it seemed more like the mountain of her dreams, a weird monolith of black stone, parts of its facade tortured and twisted in the modernist style, as intricately grooved as Sellars' odd face.

It seems like it's been waiting for me a long time-my whole life. But how could that be, when I only heard the voices for the first time a few weeks ago? Still, she could not shake off the feeling that she was on the brink of some long-sought revelation.

It's what I thought before-it's like catching fire with some religion. You just know things, you're sure of things, it doesn't matter how or why or what anyone says.

But most religions promised salvation. She expected nothing so cheerful from the black spire.

They docked in at another huge warehouse building, so close to the tower that half the sky seemed to be black. It was not that the thing was so staggeringly tall-although she could not believe it was less than a thousand feet-but that its size and solidity were so overwhelming. Seeing it in the far distance or through the bayou mists had not prepared her for its disconcerting presence.

It's not an office, it's a fortress, she realized. Whoever made this was at war, or planned to be. Maybe not against armies, but against something.

She could not help remembering the architectural remains that had sparked so many lectures from her father as the circus troupe crisscrossed Europe-the remains of this or that triumphalist regime, communist or fascist, unboundedly capitalist or unashamedly imperial. Those buildings too had screamed their importance, but there had been something different in all of them, some quality of publicness that the J Corporation tower lacked. Despite the difference in size, the only thing she could think of that came close were some of the Renaissance tower-houses of Italy, fortified islands in the middle of cities, designed for defense over glamour.

I've never seen a multibillion dollar office building that so clearly said, "Go away," she thought. And I am ignoring the warning-like whistling past the sign that says, "Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here."

What are you doing, Olga?

But she already knew the answer.

Esther found her standing quietly in a corner, trying to work up the courage to follow the rest of the chattering workers into the massive outbuilding that housed the entrances to the skyscraper's service corridors and elevators. "C'mon, sweetie," she said, patting Olga's arm and making her jump, "they started the countdown when your badge went through that door back there, coming off the boat. More than ten minutes to get to our station and you lose half an hour's pay."

Olga mumbled an apology and fell into step behind Esther. She was feeling extraordinarily reluctant to enter the huge black edifice, its polished surfaces gleaming with reflected sunset.

"Oh, no, why you got that backpack?"

Olga tried to look surprised. "What's wrong?"

"You're not supposed to bring nothing like that over here," Esther said. "I guess 'cause they think we might steal or something." She made an amused expression of disgust. "But they are real strict about that.

Oh, sweetie, you should have asked me, I would have told you to leave it in your locker back on the esplanade."

"I didn't know. It's just my lunch and some medicine I'm taking."

"They have a regulation box you bring lunch in, they run them all through some x-ray or something when the boat comes in," Esther frowned. "Well, we'll find some place to leave it. You don't want to get in trouble your first day."

Olga shook her head. No, she certainly didn't want to get in trouble her first day, but she didn't plan to be separated from her bag, either. Under quick inspection the contents looked innocent enough, but anything more thorough and she would be attracting a lot more attention than the average custodial employee.

Her bag safely stowed in one of the cubbyholes provided for the custodians to stash rainwear and other items impractical to carry around the offices, Olga was introduced to her first day (and last, she fervently hoped) as a J Corporation cleaner. Esther, Olga, and a team of six other women were given B Level by the on-site supervisor, two floors below the street. It was mildly disturbing to think that they were working in a big tube down below the surface of the lake, but any tendency to dwell on that, or on the much more immediately dangerous things she planned, was quickly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work. Stepping carefully over the hubcap-sized vacuuming robots, they moved from office to office dumping wastebaskets, cleaning surfaces, and tidying the common areas. The bathrooms took special attention, all fixtures to be scrubbed. As the newest worker on-shift, Olga was gifted with the least pleasant tasks, which of course included cleaning the toilets and urinals with a brush and a spray bottle of some enzymatic cleaner whose floral overtones could not cover up the more disturbing chemical whiff underneath. Esther warned her sternly about not spilling any. What she had thought was an admonition to thrift became clearer when she dripped some on the back of her hand and felt her skin burn.

B Level was wider than the aboveground tower and held hundreds of offices. As the night crept by in a cloud of fumes, underscored by the off-key singing of a couple of the other women and the constant sucking and chewing noises of the gray vacuum-bots, Olga realized how lucky she had been that her little fantasy of actually doing such a job for a living had not been true.

How can they stand it? she wondered. With the supervisors watching so closely, like strict teachers, and some of them won't even let you talk except in whispers. I always thought that in a job like this you'd at least get to chat and joke with fellow employees, but there hasn't been much of that since we got off the boat. Is the company really that stingy, frightened that these women are going to waste a few minutes'

worth of their wages?

Her answer came when she paused for a moment to lean on a desk near one of the restrooms and the wallscreen beside it leaped into fife, activated by her touch. The screen displayed only a scene of someone's children sitting in a sailboat, a personal photo used as wallpaper, but within moments one of the on-site supervisors, a fat man named Leo with an unpleasant wheeze, was standing next to her.

"What are you doing?"

"Nothing. I . . . I just leaned on the desk. I didn't mean to. . . ."

"Well, don't. Where's your badge?"

She showed it to him. He squinted, frowning as if angry at being forced to do what was presumably his job.

"First day, is it?" he said. He did not sound much mollified. "Then you learn a lesson, and learn it good.

You don't touch anything except what you're cleaning. You want to keep this job, you pay attention.

There are plenty more would be happy to make good money. Don't touch anything. Repeat that back."

Stung, furious at this petty, rude man, Olga fought to keep an outward aspect of frightened subservience.